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Designing a pedagogical interface for a repository of video interviews

One of the goals in the Corpus to Classroom project is to design a pedagogical interface for the repository of video clips that are being generated out of the more than 100 interviews that were collected in the past as part of the Spanish in Texas project. From our interviews with actual teachers and materials developers, we confirmed that teachers are potentially interested in applying the following types of filtering criteria to their searches:

Grammar topics: e.g., search for those clips that contain a significant number of occurrences of por and para

Functional topics: e.g., search for those clips that contain exponents of the function apologizing

Thematic: e.g., clips talking about food, traditions, reasons for moving to the US (in our case)…

This is not a complete list, but it is a starting one that contains the most common types of criteria (emotion and phonetics are two criteria that were mentioned too).

With this in mind we are considering the use of a standard search engine (such as Apache Solr/Lucene) to allow teachers to search for the clips and use facets (filtering options) to dig down or define finer-grained queries. However, we also consider the use of typical corpus query tools (such as CWB or SketchEngine — or NoSketchEngine). With this we can cover the Information Retrieval part of our task (more appropriate for document retrieval on the basis of word- or term-based queries) and the Information Extraction part of our task (more appropriate for the queries driven by linguistic patterns).

About Martí Q.

I am a graduate student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and at Karls-Eberhard Universität in Tübingen. My PhD dissertation is a study on the methodological and technical aspects that can help produce ICALL activities that are pedagogically meaningful and computationally feasible. I have worked in the design and implementation of several software solutions including Natural Language Processing techniques, among them web interfaces to parallel and monolingual corpora, the development of morphosyntactic taggers and parsers, and the development of end-user spell, grammar and style checking tools.